Today, Nokia and Intel announced the merge of Maemo and Moblin into the MeeGo project. This is sad, because it will end the era of the Debian-based mobile operating system Maemo and replace it with a system using RPM and probably some other evil stuff as well. In fact, dpkg & apt-get where two of my main reasons to buy the N900. And another question is why yet another name. Moblin was already a well-known name and they shouldn t have changed the name just because they switch the servers and add some Nokia developers. Furthermore, does this all mean that there will be no Maemo 6? What will happen to the Maemo users on the N900, will it be possible for them to use MeeGo? Maybe this is the time to start a new project, Debian Mobile. Debian Mobile would take the MeeGo experience and apply it to a Debian system. This would probably the best mobile operating system ever, being backed by Debian s large repositories with thousands of software packages. Filed under: Debian

Want a healthy diet, but difficulty determining diet have much less heart disease and diabetes, now do not need to be confused. The problem currently existing software can determine which food or menu with us. This tool was created Muhammad Burhanuddin SI students majoring in the College information systems Information Management and Computer Engineering (STIKOM). Pemuda Surabaya original was inspired by his desire to want to get the ideal body weight. He then sought a reference from a variety of books on diet and sehata the ideal body shape. From the book, he then designed a program for determining menu diet with computerized systems. Yes at first it was because I found it difficult to lose weight and see the number of experts in determining the diet for patients with certain diseases, he said on the red building STIKOM Surabaya, Jalan Kedung Baruk, Thursday (15/10/2009). During the decisive finishing diet program, she had difficulty in the verification phase of the rule which took one month of a total of four months of completion of the program is the final project. This 21 year young man said this program can ciptaanya to help digunakanahli nutrition diet suitable for the patient. At first nutritionist to determine the menu of resus a patient s blood type that has gone through laboratory tests. Then determine the disease
patients suffered until finally obtained the results of a diet, he said.

It s hard to do a healthy diet outside the home? Whereas many of the activities carried out. Try some tips refer to following a healthy diet that you can do outside. re Dieting to reduce consumption of fats, carbohydrates or sugar? That does not mean you can not eat well. With a few tricks and cunning look of food, you can even a good meal in a restaurant also order food from fast-food restaurant. Try it voyeur tips from DASH, Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. With these healthy tips you can still eat well and avoid high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels. Well, try telling refer to the following tips: 1. Avoid foods with saturated fats and cholesterol High
But avoid foods that contain saturated fatty acids and also high yan foods contain cholesterol. You can avoid these foods but still give priority to taste, a variety of menus to choose from, even a favorite. If you re eating out make sure the following things:
- Make sure your food is cooked using olive oil instead of butter or
fat if the dish was a stir-fried or something.
- Ask for salad dressing or salad dressings are low in fat.
- If mkan meat or chicken, remove the parts that contain fat such as chicken skin.
- Choose foods with dimaska burned, boiled, or baked. In addition to not using oil, usually healthier. 2. Watchful Against Salt
Another thing to note that this works DASH diet is salt. Because salt can raise your blood pressure, while salt is often used in a variety of restaurants to make food more delicious. You still can control the salt in your food when eating out by doing:
- Ask the waiter to not put salt or MSG in your food.
- Beware of any food that a high salt content such as pickles, soy sauce, broth, bacon, and others.
- Keep the salt from your desk, because usually you will reflexively add salt to the food.
- Reduce the use of mustard, ketchup, pickles, and other Condiment a high salt content.
- Choose fruits or vegetables as the opening menu. 3. Avoid foods with a portion of
But avoid foods with large portions. In addition you will feel
unfortunately if the foods are not consumed, you will feel sick if you eat too much excess. We recommend that you order enough food. Or if that portion is too big, shared with friends is much better. 4. Always Instill Healthy Living Patterns in the Mind
More and more people realize how important a healthy life, making a lot of restaurants started to state that low-fat or rich in antioxidants to the food they sell. Actually do not stop until the food alone, you
also have to think about drinks or dessert healthy what happens to the balance. For example:
- Choose a drink that does not cause side effects, such as mineral water, fruit juice, or herbal tea.
- Expand vegetables and fruits as well as the opening menu to avoid overeating at the main menu.
- If you decide to eat a salad, choose low-fat sauce or put the sauce on the plate edge so that its use is not excessive.
- Avoid mouthwashes that contain high fat like cheese cake. We recommend that you choose desserts such as fruit, sorbet, or fruit jelly. 5. Order careful in Resto Fast Food
Fast-food restaurant is the most dangerous enemy to your diet. But if you are careful, you can still enjoy fast food without the fear of cholesterol or high blood pressure soared and certainly does not ruin your diet program. Here are some tips if your food in the restaurant inginmemesan fast food:
- Take your time choosing foods, read the content carefully to what
contained in one serving. And do not be shy to ask the waiter about
Andapesan food.
- Combine your foods such as grilled chicken with whole wheat and yogurt drinks or low-fat milk.
- Do not order more servings.
- Be aware of and avoid salad dressings containing Condiment bleak high salt soy sauce, ketchup, and pickles.
- To drink mineral water should choose, even if others want to order to avoid fizzy drinks.

Multiple Sclerosis is a disease of the central nervous disorder that weakens the immune system. A study showed that obese adolescent girls affected by MS have opportunities in the future. During the 40-year study of 238,000 women found that adolescent girls suffer from obesity at the age of 18 years had twice the risk of MS affected than teens of that age have more slender bodies. Fatty tissue which accumulates as a teenager allegedly memproduki substances that affect the immune system that triggers the possibility of MS. However, body size during the children and adults are not found in relation to risk of MS. Researchers have made a study report in the journal Neurology. Researchers still need to take further evidence to confirm these findings. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health used data from the nurses about diet, lifestyle factors and health. During the study, 593 women are diagnosed with MS, a disease caused by loss of nerve fibers and myelin sheath in the brain and spinal cord that makes nerve damage. Researchers compared the risk of disease with body mass index (BMI) or weight to height ratio, in women aged 18 years. Studies show those who have weight BMI 30 or greater at the age of 18 years had twice the risk of MS. Our results indicate that body weight during adolescence is very important in determining the risk of MS, said Kassandra Munger ScD from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, as quoted by BBC News, Monday (9/11/2009). There are many studies that support that adolescence is an important time for the development of the disease, so what we found was associated with it, he said. He added that obesity prevention early adolescence is an especially important step in reducing the risk of MS in the future. Previous research has found vitamin D levels are high can reduce the risk of MS and the researchers showed that obesity associated with low levels of vitamin D in the body.

Everyone knows that exercise can heal the body. But why only a few people who routinely perform the activity? Ask yourself. The answer is, maybe you less motivated to do so. A survey ever conducted to find out why people rarely do sports. The survey involving 15,000 women from 25 countries showed that although nearly half of them know that exercise is very important for health, but less than 25 percent of it done. Why? More than two-thirds of respondents said that they would exercise more often if the gym was fun. So far, they consider it as a routine or demand to stay healthy so feel burdened. Although the facts say so, but it is unfortunate if people take sport as a less desirable activity. If you are not motivated to do the morning run, bike or fitness, try these few tips that may improve your mood for a workout without having to feel it as a demand or load. 1. Participate In A Club
Come in a club full of adventure and can arrange your sporting activity each week. Find information from friends or open the website that provides these facilities. 2. Involve Friends
If you are interested in joining a club, you can do sports with your friends or beloved. Sport activities together can evoke passion and spirit to not realize that you are really doing is exercise, not just recreation. 3. Try New Types
Trying something new will make you feel to have new experiences and unexpected. Make your muscles work with the new type of sport and do not usually very good for your body. 4. Make A Game
You would be very interested in an adventure or a game. Making sport like games is a good idea. Make activities as the game ran find treasure limited time, and you will feel more happy and challenged. 5. Back to Boyhood
Do you remember when as a child running around all day without feeling tired and bored? It feels good right? That s what you should do now. Create a day where you can be reunited with friends and do sports or play activities you usually do in childhood. Rollerblading in the park to play or jump rope can be very enjoyable. 6. Give Credits For Yourself
If you ve managed to do sports, try giving a gift to yourself. Watching the film series, enjoying a plate of spaghetti or relax at the spa can be temoat rewards you deserve for successfully achieving exercise goals. Most people who do not enjoy the sport has a very dense activity and also because they are not used to doing. But if once you find that it is a routine exercise that is enjoyable, you will begin to enjoy it. Without realizing it, you also have to do two things at once is fun, physical exercise and psychological. Good luck.

Vierra band to be different in 2010. The personnel men, Kevin cs, want to look more muscular. Of course there are reasons why the personnel Ballerina boys want to look more muscular. Raka Cyril, the guitarist, spoke up to express that excuse. . To create a more muscular body would need a business. So, Kevin (keyboards), Raka (guitar) and Tryan (drums), do not forget the additional bass player, Deryansha Azhary, melakoni fitness. Fitness together can maintain cohesion, said Raka again. The desire for fitness with the new fact emerged two weeks ago. At that time only as an expense only. But after thinking together, three boys Vierra agreed to be different in 2010. Apart from personnel appearance that her boyfriend would be more muscular, there is no change from the Ballerina in 2010. Band with hits Are You Really it was not planning to release a new album. We do not want to hurry. s Album coming out yesterday, not to waste too, added Widi, the vocalist.

Another attempt to shorten my list of movies where not having seen them makes me an absolute philistine, according to various friends: Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffmann. Ignoring the tragic history behind it (the French penal system in French Guiana during the colonial era I didn't know about this from school), it's great entertainment. There is a kind of happy end, but nowhere close to what Hollywood does to its stories these days... A long time on the to watch list: The Fifth Element by Luc Besson. I don't know why but I had always been sceptical if I'd enjoy this one, but my feeling was completely wrong. Real fun. While I think the basic idea of superheroes getting older and having a midlife crisis, or a daughter, (and of course during the film, getting back into action) could make a wonderful film, the ending of Watchmen left me with a bad feeling about the whole film. But then I never read or watched superhero cartoons anyway, so maybe it's just that I'm not the intended audience for this one. Finally, V for Vendetta is another interpretation of the 1984 theme (actually, it's the interpretation of a graphic novel, but I've not read that), with a very well chosen John Hurt as Big Brother (or, I should say, High Chancellor Adam Sutler.) With quite a few slapstick moments, this isn't really as dark as the theme might suggest.

A few days ago, I woke up to the fact that Google has become yet another MSN. The stupid opt-out policy of their latest gadget, Google Buzz, means that I can no longer entrust Google with anything. In case it wasn't obvious to the idiots at Google, no, I do not want every single person that ever sent me a random e-mail to suddenly get automated access to whatever on-line content I'm producing; I want to choose who will get access to what and be able to change my mind about what any particular individual will get access to at any given time. Most of all, I want this to be opt-in by default. That is, unless I explicitly enabled access to some specific content to a specific individual, the assumption shall be that nobody has access to anything that I produce. Alas, it seems too much to ask from Google. So now I'm looking for a reliable no-frills webmail service that is too boring to ever get under the radar of any media content giant. First, it was Hotmail no more, now it's Google no more. I also have another simple request: that the selected e-mail address can include hyphens and periods. If anybody knows of any such simple and reliable on-line webmail service, please drop me a line via this blog article's comments. Thanks!

The Telegraph has a silly article titled Aliens are likely to look and behave like us [1]. It s based on the ideas of Professor Simon Conway Morris [2] who is a big fan of evolutionary convergence. He seems to believe that humans evolved in a way that is close to optimal and that aliens would have to evolve in a similar manner. The article s claim that aliens will look and behave like us has three flaws, one is assuming that humans are the ideal form for space travel, another is the significant possibilities for vast objective differences between species, and the final one is the human tendency to regard small differences as being really significant. The Arrogance of Assuming that Humans are Ideal. It seems extremely arrogant to assume that humans have the ideal form for performing tasks that we have not yet performed such as traveling to another star system. To assume that it is certain that humans will colonise the stars is also extremely arrogant and foolish as well, I think that a significant amount of money should be devoted to existential risks that we face. People who believe that humans will inevitably colonise the stars (probably because God told them there s no other reason for such certainty) will tend to oppose taking prudent measures to reduce the probability of failure. We should also consider the possibility that a human society that colonises another star system at some future time might be so different from us that we regard them as alien. How Might Aliens be Different? It seems to me that one problem with the theory of convergent evolution (as applied to different planets) is that evolution doesn t seem to work in big steps. It seems to me that for an increasing portion of the jobs in our technological society there would be a benefit in having four arms and two legs, and maybe having more than four fingers on two of the hands. But evolving a bone structure that makes four arms useful is not a minor tweak so it seems unlikely to happen naturally we might be able to genetically modify humans to have four arms and two legs with some future technology. I can t believe that four limbs is the optimal number for every mammal, amphibian and reptile (apart from the legless ones), that two legs plus two wings is the optimal number for every bird, and that six legs is the optimal number for every insect. I also can t believe that two arms and two legs is the optimum number for every primate with the only significant difference in limbs being the primates that possess a prehensile tail. Evolution doesn t produce perfect creatures, what it does is to produce creatures that tend to be slightly fitter than their ancestors. So even if there was an optimal form for a species that develops interstellar-craft, there would be no reason to assume that humans have such a form even if we had developed interstellar travel. I think it s relatively safe to assume that aliens would have two eyes (stereoscopic vision is a significant advantage), but apart from that I don t think we can assume much about their appearance. For example I don t think that there s any inherent reason why creatures as intelligent as current humans could not evolve from octopuses 8 arms would be quite useful for operating machines. Aliens that spread beyond their own home planet don t have to be optimal for such tasks, they only need to become the dominant species on their planet, develop decent technology, and then want to leave their planet. A species that took 100,000 years to achieve what humans have achieved in the past 100 years might not be considered optimal but it might still be able to eventually launch interstellar craft. I don t think it s reasonable to assume that aliens would have to be as intelligent as humans to do that. But it does seem most likely that any aliens who manage to get here would be more intelligent than us. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond has a really interesting analysis of how human history was determined by geography and the availability of plants and animals suitable for domestication. Part of the explanation for the apparent lack of intelligent aliens could be planets where the dominant species was stuck in a situation like that of the people of New Guinea, the lack of plants and animals suitable for domestication prevented their society from developing. A stone-age human civilisation could potentially be stable for millions of years. The article says Extra-terrestrials might not only resemble us but have our foibles, such as greed, violence and a tendency to exploit others resources . Well for starters a species that can displace all other contenders to become the dominant species in their planet would have to be capable of greed and violence. So that is probably correct but is not really going out on a limb. Physorg.com has a short article describing the benefits of sexual reproduction in terms of the rate of accumulation of harmful mutations [3]. So it seems that sexual reproduction is most likely among intelligent aliens. But I don t think that there is any reason to assume that aliens couldn t be hermaphrodites. The Telegraph article claims that Star Wars and Star Trek could be more accurate than they ever imagined in depicting alien life , but given that Star Trek has avoided homosexuality even when demanded by the plot it seems that whatever aliens do in the bedroom would be way outside the range of activities alluded to in Star Trek. It seems that almost all sci-fi has aliens that are less alien than a significant portion of the human population. I think it s safe to predict that if we should meet aliens they will not look like humans wearing cheap make-up or rubber suits that has more to do with the budgets assigned to movie studios than any claim to potential realism. It seems most likely that a society capable of developing space travel would need a great deal of training for it s young before they become self-sufficient. Species of animal that abandon their eggs and hope for the best seem unlikely to succeed in doing that. I think that this implies that a pair-bonded species that spends an extended amount of time raising their young is most likely to succeed. Perceptions of Aliens Vulcans are widely regarded as being on the Autism spectrum. So it seems that having some similarities in personality to about 1% of the human population is enough to convince most human viewers that the character in question is an alien. A Google search for such things just turns up many references to people on the Autism spectrum who feel like aliens which incidentally is the source of the alias ETBE [4] that I used for more than 10 years before being diagnosed as an Aspie. Star Trek aliens aren t actually very alien by human standards! Given the repeated demonstrations of the general human inability to recognise the psychological similarities in people from different countries or racial/ethnic/religious backgrounds it seems likely that few people would recognise aliens as being at all similar to us. As so many people are unable to recognise the fundamental similarities in people who happen to have a different skin color I can t imagine many people immediately regarding beings that look like octopuses as having human traits. Could an eusocial organism (such as bees or ants) develop space travel? It seems to me that most people wouldn t regard humans who act in a manner that resembles ants (such as the Borg Collective) as being like us . The possibility of an eusocial race evolved from humans is explored in Coalescent: A Novel (Destiny s Children, Bk. 1) by Stephen Baxter (and more briefly in the sequels). Probability The universe is a large place. Making a specific prediction about the first alien species that we might encounter might make some sense. But given the potentially billions of species that might be out there we should assume that some of the more improbable forms are represented. Claiming that anything in particular is impossible seems very rash. Also anyone who makes claims about what evolution should do seems to have missed the point. What evolution does is to give rise to species that tend to be a better fit for the environment. Different environments result in different creatures. We can try and predict what creatures might evolve, but we don t get to say that things should happen.

• [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7071013/Aliens-are-likely-to-look-and-behave-like-us.html
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Conway_Morris
• [3] http://www.physorg.com/news183318256.html
• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_Biological_Entity

(maybe) After the two updates in the previous post, I got further and eventually fixed the root of the remaining problems on ARM. It appears I got on the wrong track at the very beginning of the investigation. My first test was to disable the JIT compiler during the tests, and it didn t affect the result. I assumed from there that the JIT compiler was doing fine and wasn t involved. Which led me to believe the alignment of the stack at 32-bits word boundary instead of 64-bits was a standard behaviour. I turns out my first test itself was wrong, because I hadn t disabled the JIT compiler at all. You need to modify the runxpcshelltests.py script to disable the JIT, and not fiddle with the javascript.options.jit.chrome preference. The JIT compiler was misaligning the stack, and disassembling the generated code leading to broken behaviour revealed that it was doing so when setting up arguments on the stack for function calls. While I was afraid this would be difficult to fix without changing a lot of code, and first only disabled the JIT compiler, it turns out the way nanojit works by compiling the last instructions first did make it straightforward to fix. But ARM was not the only RC buggy architecture left after sparc and powerpc were fixed. MIPS remained. Alpha fails, too, but it is not a release architecture. Update: It appears hurd fails too, but like Alpha, it is not a release architecture. So, while I didn t want to wait 50 hours for a build, I managed to execute a failing test with the last xulrunner-1.9.1 packages that got built (before I enabled the test suite) under qemu. And I was able to track down the origin of the bug: the xpcom layer that translate function calls between languages doesn t fill arguments correctly when they are smaller than 32 bits. While the code is adapted to the mipsel case, which is little endian, it doesn t work on mips, which is big endian. I came up with a patch that should work, and which I hope won t break mipsel as a consequence. All that is left to do is to build and test the fix. I hope someone else will be able to do that for me. All in all except a 1.9.1.8 release this week with a lot less red on the buildd status page.

On Saturday, I joined The Albuquerque Rocket Society monthly launch in Rio Rancho, NM. A friend, Mike, who lives in the area joined me for the launch. While the morning started off clear and calm, if a bit cold... the wind came up hard and we had to call it quits before lunch. But before the wind "blew us away", I managed to get one flight in. And it was an absolutely perfect test of one of my brand-new TeleMetrum v0.2 boards! My cut-down Hawk Mountain "Raptor" kit, renamed "G-Spot" last October during my quest to exceed 50 g acceleration, was loaded with TeleMetrum serial number 51... and launched on a Cesaroni 229H255WT-14A motor. The ascent was beautiful! I've put a few photos of the rocket leaving the launch rail up on flickr. However, despite a clear sky, we quickly lost sight of it! I managed to spot a bit of the smoke trail from the delay grain as the rocket approached apogee, but that was it! None of us at the launch saw anything after apogee! After losing sight of the rocket, I turned my attention to my computer, where we were receiving a solid telemetry stream. It quickly became apparent that the rocket was descending normally under chute. As it got closer to the ground, I started calling out elevation, azimuth, and distance numbers, but still nobody could spot the rocket. As expected, we lost the RF link once the rocket reached the ground. As various folks on the flight line wished me luck finding my rocket, I put the last reported GPS position into my hand-held receiver. Staring at the map display, Mike and I realized the rocket was far down range, near one of the roads into the site. We jumped into my vehicle and drove down the road to the point closest to the rocket's reported position. We then walked to where the GPS receiver said the rocket should be... And found the rocket within about 20 feet! That was well within the window of position uncertainty my hand-held GPS was reporting at the time. Things just don't get much better than that! We picked up the rocket, and returned to the flight line only a few minutes after leaving it. After dumping the data from the board's on-board memory, I quickly generated the usual plots, along with a kml file that can be viewed in Google Earth. The rocket reached 1881 meters apogee, or around 6173 feet, and the maximum acceleration was 19.5 g. It touched down nearly 1.3 miles down range from the launch rail, in sage-brush desert. I honestly don't think I would have found the rocket without at least the radio beacon. It was hugely gratifying that the GPS worked and let me walk right up to the rocket! I could not have asked for a better test of the new electronics! Later in the day, Keith flew a successful test of serial number 52 at a launch in Wilsonville, Oregon. We're very happy with these results! Weather permitting, I hope to get more test flights in next weekend at Hudson Ranch. Stay tuned!

Dell has been offering Ubuntu on selected models for a while. I had however nearly given up hope on being able to buy one, because they hadn t started doing that in Australia. I am very glad to see this has changed though check out their notebook page. Not all models yet, but a reasonable number have Ubuntu as an option. Yay!

This spring I'm taking a class that does all its programming assignments in MIT Scheme. The last time I had to write Scheme for class, we used PLT Scheme, and thus the DrScheme editor. This time, with that option out, I've decided to do the assignments in Emacs. It is, after all, an editor built out of lisp. I've used vim for the last five years or so. Some people ask me why this is so I do go to MIT after all, where Emacs was originally written. The answer to that is simply that Debian got to me first, and at the time at least, the people I knew there used vim. I've heard Emacs is good, but up until this point every time I've tried it I've thrown it down in frustration and then couldn't figure out how to exit the damn thing. This time I was more determined, and made it through the initial hump of being completely useless at the editor. Here are a few of my observations so far, after mucking around for a couple days over a period of about two weeks:

• The movement commands seem much more awkward to me. Since I'm using the Colemak keyboard layout, I have backspace bound to Caps-Lock, and it is not available to be a Control key. It may be that I just need some more time to get used to emacs not being modal.
• It's awkward to switch between split windows using C-x o when I have 4-6 open at a time. I'd like to be able to jump between specific ones directly.
• C-x 3 will always split the window containing the current buffer evenly in two, which makes it difficult to, for example, create three equally sized vertical windows, side-by-side. Vim defaults to creating evenly sized windows even when you invoke a split twice in a row.
• The paradigm of being able to have e.g. a scheme buffer or a shell as one of my split windows is nice, though I haven't yet gotten used to having to use emacs special bindings to interact with those buffers rather than what I'd use if I'd just invoked the command from a terminal.
• I noticed that emacs automatically detects the VCS in my directory. It seems incredibly bizarre to me to interact with my VCS from my editor. Do people actually do this?
• Emacs's use of the tab character to perform code indentation is interesting. It does solve the problem of code being auto-indented when you don't want it to, which sometimes happens to me in vim, but I wonder if it actually ends up saving keystrokes in the end, since I think not auto-indenting is the exception rather than the rule for me.
• There seem to be two different methods for completion: "dynamic abbrev" expansion, which I believe is analagous to what I'm used to in vim, and M-TAB (what a horrible keybinding, as most window managers will grab this for window-switching), which seems to be some sort of language-specific completion. I haven't yet seen how this can be harnessed since the symbolic completion seems to be irrelevant for scheme.
• Emacs's syntax highlighting gets at least one thing right about scheme that vim doesn't: extended comments between # # patterns.
• Bookmarks seem waaay more verbose/awkward than vim's marks. C-x r m NAME huh? I like being able to have a very short pattern to mark and jump back to points in a file, like vim's m/ syntax for marks. Maybe I'll need to bind the bookmark functions to something else.

I'm pretty sure at this point that I'm still trying to bend emacs into being vim with different keybindings instead of figuring out how emacs wants to be used. It's also difficult to compare and contrast between the two editors in that my .vimrc contains years of tweaks and customizations whereas my .emacs started out as a clean slate. There are two things I'm doing to try to mentally separate emacs from vim, to avoid my fingers' muscle memory from becoming confused:

1. I'm always using emacs in an X window with dark-on-light text, whereas I always use vim in a terminal with light-on-dark text.
2. I'm only writing scheme in emacs. No other languages so far.

I'm planning to keep working on these programming assignments in emacs, despite it being annoying slower than I would be in vim. Tips and pointers for improving my experience are welcome.

Test Flying TeleMetrum v0.2 Bdale and I got a chance to test fly the new version (0.2) of our TeleMetrum flight computers. Bdale flew with the Albuquerque Rocket Society down in New Mexico while I flew near home with Oregon Rocketry during our February model launch. I flew my Dynastar Grappler which I have modified to create a large payload bay out of a foot of the original body tube: I cut a sled out of plywood and mounted the TeleMetrum on one side, and a small 110mAh battery on the back: The field we use for model launches is surrounded by tall fir trees, so we tend to stick to reasonably small motors. This time, I loaded up an Aerotech 24mm E18 motor and trimmed the delay down to about 5 seconds as this rocket uses simple motor ejection. This flight didn t exercise the new ejection circuitry. In any case, the flight was perfect, telemetry worked all the way down to the ground using just a 1/4 wave whip antenna on the receiver. Here s the data recorded in the on-board eeprom: The maximum reported altitude was 186m, velocity was 49m/s and acceleration was 53m/s . As expected, the GPS loses tracking during boost, but rapidly re-acquires near apogee and tracks the rocket all the way back to the ground. The flight track can be viewed in Google Earth. Needless to say, both Bdale and I are extremely pleased with the performance of the new hardware.

again a short overview about my RC bug activities:

• #549760 src:libipc-shareable-perl: "libipc-shareable-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  grab patch from upstream bug tracker (pkg-perl)
• #561712 live-magic: "live-magic: helpers now installed in /usr/share/live-helper/helpers and not /usr/bin"
  cancel NMU (1.7+nmu1) since 1.8 was uploaded
• #564347 tuxguitar: "tuxguitar: FTBFS: Nonexistent build-dependency: libswt-gtk-3.4-java"
  check NMU on mentors and add a comment to the BTS (later uploaded by the co-maintainer)
• #564352 src:libio-compress-perl: "libio-compress-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload package prepared by mxey (pkg-perl)
• #564384 src:libpoe-component-ikc-perl: "libpoe-component-ikc-perl: FTBFS: tests hang"
  forward upstream (pkg-perl)
• #566560 libgpib-bin: "fails to install"
  create directory that's used in postinst and upload to DELAYED/2
• #566576 selinux-basics: "fails to install"
  call dh_installdirs in debian/rules and upload to DELAYED/2
• #566590 libxml-stream-perl: "FTBFS: tests fail"
  add comment, change tags, test, close (pkg-perl)
• #567240 halevt: "init.d script fails without configuration file"
  apply slightly modified patch from BTS and upload
• #569067 libnet-amazon-s3-perl: "module fails at load with Moose error"
  (bump severity to serious and) make a (build) dependency versioned (pkg-perl)
• #569086 libnet-amazon-s3-perl: "libnet-amazon-s3-perl FTBFS (missing build-dep on libtest-exception-perl)"
  (report bug and) add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #569091 libvideo-capture-v4l-perl: "Uses obsolete V4L1 API"
  forward upstream (pkg-perl)
• #569437 src:libmixin-extrafields-param-perl: "libmixin-extrafields-param-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  fix the "problem package" and upload both (pkg-perl)
• #569450 src:libi18n-charset-perl: "libi18n-charset-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  fix the "problem package" and upload both (pkg-perl)

mostly pkg-perl related again, but at least a few other things, too ....

I ve just bought a Thinkpad T61 at auction for $AU796. My Thinkpad T41p has cooling problems which I have previously described[1]. It s also started to rattle a bit when I hold it upside down since I took it apart so I guess I didn t do a great job at trying to fix it (probably the fan is getting obstructed). Now it has developed some screen problems where the screen back-light will periodically turn off and stay off until I press and release the lid-close button (to turn the screen off and on again), this is apparently the symptom of a broken inverter [2]. I was quoted $160 to fix the inverter and $250 to replace the entire screen by laptop.com.au (a very reliable laptop sales and repair company that I ve dealt with before) [3]. Also the system has the red screen problem where intermittently the screen turns reddish so paying $250 for a replacement screen is worth considering. I decided not to do this as I have seen refurbished Thinkpad T41p systems on sale for about $400 and spending $160 now and possibly $250 later on a $400 system didn t seem like a good idea. One thing that has annoyed me about my Thinkpad for a long time is the lack of PAE support in the Pentium-M CPU which makes it impossible to run Xen [4], so upgrading to a newer system will allow me to use virtualisation for the purpose of fixing bugs in Debian/Unstable among other things. As I want a Trackpoint it seems that a Thinkpad is the best option (Thinkpads are also great in many other ways). So really all want is a new Thinkpad with an equal or higher resolution screen, more than 1.5G of RAM (what I ve currently got) and at least PAE (but ideally hardware virtualisation for KVM) as rumor has it that ACPI doesn t work well with Xen and also Xen has a history of being a little unreliable at the best of times. I m after a portable desktop replacement system, so I m not after an X series or anything else light either. Even though the new prices on Thinkpads are generally more than I want to pay I first checked the Lenovo web site. It sucks in a magnificent way. First there were some basic site navigation issues, such as the fact that I often can t click my middle mouse button on a link to open it in a new tab (I get some sort of Javascript error) it seems that the Lenovo web team didn t consider the possibility that I might want to have the details of different series of Thinkpad open in different tabs for the purpose of comparison. But the kicker is the fact that most Thinkpads don t have the screen resolution displayed! It seems to me that one of the most important factors in purchasing a laptop is the screen resolution and Lenovo generally don t provide it! The Ideapad is described as having a resolution of 1024*600 (a netbook not a laptop), the Thinkpad Edge has 1366*768 (not that good), and the R400 and R500 are WXGA which is anything between 1280*720 (sucky) and 1366*768 (slightly less sucky). So it seems that the low end models have technical details which could allow a potential customer to reject them, while the high end models don t have technical details needed to justify the purchase price! Fortunately a friend who works for IBM was able to find me the necessary information, this site allows you to enter the part number of any Thinkpad and receive a reasonably complete set of specifications (including display resolution) [5]. With the information on that site I was able to successfully bid on the single Thinkpad in a Lenovo auction of refurbished systems that had a resolution that was satisfactory. The fact that the Lenovo auctions of refurbished systems also lack the details is another think that Lenovo do wrong. In this case I started bidding one minute before the auction closed and had to push the price up by $125 to win it. Given the number of auctions that Lenovo runs world-wide they would probably benefit from fixing their web site just to get the occasional Thinkpad price increased by $125. Not to mention the number of people who are discouraged from buying new Thinkpads because they can t get information on what they might be paying for.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/19/taking-thinkpad-apart/
• [2] http://www.laptoprepair101.com/laptop/2007/01/31/replace-screen-inverter-fix-backlight/
• [3] http://laptop.com.au/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/02/the-future-of-xen/
• [5] http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/quickPath.do?quickPathEntry=6457BP2

Version 0.7.7, a shiny new bug fix release of Rcpp, our set of R / C++ interface classes, just arrived on CRAN and in Debian. The Language class had a real bug leading to this new release just two days after 0.7.6.

0.7.7	2010-02-14
    o	new template classes Rcpp::unary_call and Rcpp::binary_call
    	that facilitates using R language calls together 
    	with STL algorithms.
    	
    o	fixed a bug in Language constructors taking a string as their
    	first argument. The created call was wrong.

As always, even fuller details are in the ChangeLog on the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

A few weeks ago, I ve added support for Remote, Apple s iPhone application for controlling iTunes remotely. Here, support means Remote can be paired with forked-daapd and can be used to browse the library. And that s it, for now. At this point, there won t be much visible activity on forked-daapd for some time. I m working on a couple of things, but they take time and they require a lot of new code. So, for a couple weeks now, I ve been working on that. I have some code outside forked-daapd that is starting to work well, but it s not there yet, far from it. Then it ll have to be integrated into forked-daapd, which means a lot of new code there too. Bug fixes will still happen in the meantime, and some smaller new features may also appear before the Big Thing . So if you find or encounter bugs, feel free to report them still. If you have patches or ideas you want to discuss, feel free too. As I wrote to a couple people by mail already, good things come to those who wait or contribute. With all that, I ve updated the Debian packages, given that there won t be important changes for a while; I hope they re useful to some of you out there. Note that I m making an amd64 binary package available alongside the source package; it s built on a current Debian unstable system, but if that s not suitable for you, in terms of dependencies or architecture, you can trivially build a suitable binary package from the source package. As a reminder, I have packages of the ANTLRv3 C runtime too. I ve also added antlr-3.1.3.jar there, in case you need it and can t find it at the upstream download site.

I don t think that the answer is everyone or even everyone other than my geeky friends , but obviously it is a large number of people. Many people apparently type facebook into Google and try to login to the first thing that they see, if it happens to not be Facebook then they whine this became known after a Google search for facebook login happened to not return the Facebook login page as the first link [1]. This blog post claims that they are not stupid [2] the specific claim is that URLs etc are just too complex. I disagree, if my mother and my mother-in-law can both do better than that then I think that we should expect that a significant portion of retirees can do so and we should also expect that younger people will do better than older people. In a more specific sense, when I was in primary school I was taught the Dewey Decimal System aka Dewey Decimal Classification. With the DDC a primary school student can look up the location of a book in the library index system (cardboard files when I was at school) and then know where to find it. After looking up a book on one occasion no-one would want to repeat the effort so the sensible thing to do is to write down the DDC index to any interesting book. The same mental processes can be used for dealing with URLs, someone might find Facebook etc through Google on the first occasion but they can then use browser bookmarks and written notes for traveling to track the URLs that interest them. I think we should expect that a typical adult nowadays should be able to complete any task that would be expected of a 10yo when I was young, and I don t think it s unreasonable to call an adult stupid if they can t compare to a 10yo from the early 80 s! As a specific example, while 10yo children were given assignments to look up various books in the DDC I think that an adult can be expected to work out the value of an index on their own young children should be expected to require a little more training than adults! Some people will claim that it s not stupidity but ignorance. What exactly is supposed to have prevented these people from learning? Have the primary school libraries stopped teaching the DDC and most other things related to storing written knowledge? Is there supposed to be such an utter lack of computer skills in the general population that anyone who wants to learn will be unable to do so? I m sure that there are plenty of retirees who could seek advice from my mother or my mother-in-law if they wanted to learn about such things. NB I m not making any general comment about gender specific computer skills here, my father and my father-in-law don t seem to use the Internet much and they aren t the ones to complain to me when things break so I can t assess their skills. I am talking about four individuals and the only generalisation that I am making is that 2/4 retirees I know well seem to have good Internet skills and therefore I expect there to be a reasonable number of retirees who successfully use the Internet. The Making Light analysis and discussion of the issue has a lot of good points (Making Light does in fact make light ) [3]. But does have some claims that I find really strange, one example concerns a woman who misunderstood the way the up/down buttons work to call an elevator. Misunderstanding the buttons is one thing, but she also shared her knowledge of elevators with others, presumably she had more than a few people try to correct her and she ignored their advice. I think that someone who ignores advice from a variety of people, ignores advice that can easily be tested (just push the elevator buttons and observe what happens), and then goes around sharing their wrong ideas seems to have clearly crossed the line separating cluelessness from stupidity. One of the Making Light comments references the Clients From Hell blog a summary of strange, stupid, and amusing requests that clients have made to web design companies [4]. It seems to me that there are two noteworthy categories of anecdote on that site. One is requests that demonstrate ignorance of the work, such as requesting something significant and complex to be done in an hour. The other is requests that demonstrate contempt for the people doing the work, such as offering to pay $10 per hour. Misjudging the time taken to complete work is forgivable if someone has the skill to accurately estimate the time required then they would be able to do the work and wouldn t be asking for a quote for someone else to do it. Demonstrating contempt for someone that you are about to hire is stupid no matter how or why it s done. Clients From Hell also documents people who have requests that are obviously silly, it s understandable that someone might expect a blurry image to be sharpened as done on CSI , but wanting use image editing to reveal the face of a person who was facing away from the camera is simply assigning magical powers to the computer the fact that this sort of thing is done in shows such as Star Trek says a lot about the shows in question and their viewers. Often car metaphors are used for computers, you can be a good driver without knowing the details of how a car works but you do have to know how the pedals, switches, and steering wheel work as well as the meanings of the various dials. You can be competent at using the Internet without knowing much about bits, bytes, assembler code, or how a CPU works but you do need to know how the controls work and this means knowing how to type a URL. The basic operations of browsing the web require considerably less skill than driving a car and less skill than is commonly used in operating the telephone system (including PABX systems, mobile phones, and international calls). Anyone who is unable (not unwilling) to drive a car or make any phone call other than a local direct call and yet is reasonably intelligent could be used as an example of how an intelligent person could be unable to understand some aspects of technology, I don t think that there are many people in that situation it s difficult to find an adult in Australia who can t drive a car. Finally while it s reasonable to be uninterested in some things, it s not reasonable to be interested in doing something without wanting to learn how to do it properly. If typing facebook.com is so difficult that it exceeds someone s level of interest in the service then they shouldn t complain if they find that they can t access the service. Really typing facebook.com into the address bar of a web browser is easier than starting the engine of a car with a manual transmission, it s easier than filling the fuel tank of a car with the correct fuel, or figuring out when a car is due for service. Now there are serious security issues revealed by this event. I m sure that lots of people use similar methods to access their online banking etc. I just did a quick Google search for online banking with Australian banks, and I noticed that a few of the search results have adverts from rival banks. So it seems quite plausible that someone could trick Google into thinking that they run a bank (there are many thousands of banks in the world), run adverts competing against established banks, and phish the people who click on them. I wonder whether the best solution would be for the banks to test the security of their customers. Then any customer who gets phished by the bank s anti-fraud division would receive increased bank fees for the next few years and the rest of us who are less risk to the bank could receive lower fees. The current situation seems to be that my bank fees are partly determined by the need to recoup the money that the bank loses from customers who just use Google to find their bank s web site. I would rather not pay for the stupidity of such people. In the end all security comes down to people issues, technology just helps people do the right thing. I believe that one of the groups of stupid people on the Internet are those who believe that the Internet should be made safe for people who want to know nothing about it not even the basic library skills that are taught to primary school students.

• [1] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php
• [2] http://quietbabylon.posterous.com/i-have-some-opinions-about-the-rww-facebook-l
• [3] http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012186.html
• [4] http://clientsfromhell.tumblr.com/